CIO – TotalCIOhttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO
A SearchCIO.com blogThu, 17 Aug 2017 16:05:33 +0000en-UShourly1CIO doesn’t play chief digital officer role at GEhttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/CIO-doesnt-play-chief-digital-officer-role-at-GE
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/CIO-doesnt-play-chief-digital-officer-role-at-GEFri, 26 May 2017 23:17:22 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/CIO-doesnt-play-chief-digital-officer-role-at-GEAt an event that emphasized the role the CIO plays in digital transformation, the IT chief at General Electric made clear what the CIO doesn’t fill there: the chief digital officer role. “If you’re bringing a chief digital officer inside the company to make the company work more effectively, more productive — that’s the role...

]]>At an event that emphasized the role the CIO plays in digital transformation, the IT chief at General Electric made clear what the CIO doesn’t fill there: the chief digital officer role.

“If you’re bringing a chief digital officer inside the company to make the company work more effectively, more productive — that’s the role of the CIO,” said Jim Fowler, vice president and CIO at GE. He was speaking at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass., on Wednesday.

The chief digital officer, which shares the initialism CDO with the chief data officer, should be focused on commercial products, Fowler said — “software and analytics that you want to sell outside to your customers” — and how to develop and market those products. “That’s the value,” he said.

Change agents

Peter Weill, chairman of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research, said companies that offer innovative digital products and have data connections across services, making internal and customer operations seamless, see a significantly higher net margin than competitors do. “So that’s high stakes,” Weill said in a keynote address at the symposium.

As director of IT, the CIO plays a critical part as organizations make the shift from solely physical products and services to digital ones. But the chief digital officer role has drawn lots of attention, too, with some predicting that many CDOs would eventually replace CIOs in their organizations.

But Fowler’s comments affirm the view that gives the CIO and CDO discrete job descriptions, with data governance, IT security and cost-effectiveness the purview of the CIO and product design and marketing strategy the CDO’s. Celso Mello, CIO at Canadian home heating and cooling company Reliance Home Comfort, analyzed the roles in an article on SearchCIO’s sister site, SearchCRM.

“CIOs have focused on maintaining, improving and sometimes replacing IT infrastructure and legacy systems.” Mello wrote. “CDOs, on the other hand, are about breaking legacy paradigms and using new technology in new ways.”

Distinct — but linked

Fowler spoke about the CIO and CDO in the context of massive changes at his 125-year-old company. At the center of those changes is the “customer experience.” So companies in the market for industrial equipment like gas or steam turbines get machines that “run better, run longer, run more efficiently,” he said.

From left to right, Peter Weill, of MIT; Jim Fowler, of GE (on screen); David Gledhill, of DBS Bank; Ross Meyercord, of Salesforce; and Lucille Mayer, of BNY Mellon, chat on stage at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. Photo: Jason Sparapani/TechTarget

For Fowler, as head of IT, that means building “digital twins” of those physical assets and hooking them to data and analytics, connecting that with processes running in-house and externally in customers’ facilities.

“The CIO is focused on GE for GE. We have a billion-dollar target of productivity that we have to drive,” he said. “The CDO is focused on turning us into a $10 billion software business.”

Fowler admits that “underneath the covers, there’s a ton of overlap” between the CIO role and the chief digital officer role, and he even reports to GE’s CDO, William Ruh.

“But they are two very distinct roles,” he said. “I think if you’ve got a CDO that’s doing the role of a CIO and there’s a CIO there, a discussion needs to happen.”

For more insights on digital transformation from CIOs at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, read this SearchCIO report.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/cio-doesnt-play-chief-digital-officer-role-ge/feed/0IT security chief adds business aptitude to CISO skillshttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/IT-security-chief-adds-business-aptitude-to-CISO-skills
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/IT-security-chief-adds-business-aptitude-to-CISO-skillsSun, 30 Apr 2017 17:08:47 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/IT-security-chief-adds-business-aptitude-to-CISO-skillsJeff Haskill, the IT security chief at AstraZeneca, is, according to his boss, “a very technical CISO.” Dave Smoley, CIO at the U.K.-based pharmaceutical manufacturer, praised Haskill for his technological background, which includes nitty-gritty IT work and cybersecurity. While reporting on the collaboration between CIO and CISO and its impact on AstraZeneca’s efforts to move...

]]>Jeff Haskill, the IT security chief at AstraZeneca, is, according to his boss, “a very technical CISO.” Dave Smoley, CIO at the U.K.-based pharmaceutical manufacturer, praised Haskill for his technological background, which includes nitty-gritty IT work and cybersecurity.

While reporting on the collaboration between CIO and CISO and its impact on AstraZeneca’s efforts to move huge tracts of its IT operations to the cloud, I asked Haskill whether he agreed with Smoley. Were his CISO skills technical skills?

“I’ve done about all on the IT side,” said Haskill, who also runs the IT infrastructure team. He was a software developer, worked on servers and installed large networks. He’s also grounded in forensics and many IT security areas.

“The thing is that you can’t stop there,” he said. “You’ve got to go ahead and understand what the business wants.”

Understanding that is key to an IT strategy designed to encourage scientific innovation and business growth at AstraZeneca, Haskill said. It’s also part of a larger trend: Business skills like communication and policymaking are becoming essential CISO skills.

Candy Alexander, a former CISO and independent consultant, said there are still more technical CISOs out there than business-minded ones, but the role in general is “morphing more into a business partner,” much like the CIO role.

The challenge for CISOs today, Alexander said, is they “have to keep feet in both worlds” — understanding deeply technical issues regarding cybersecurity and IT architecture and the often political and contractual language of business.

Haskill faces the challenge by handing a lot of the technical aspects he oversees over to “people that are obviously a lot smarter than I am” — namely, his security operations, networks and infrastructure teams — so he can focus on business needs.

But having solid knowledge of those issues, however — knowing how cybersecurity fits into the company’s compliance with industry regulations, for example — makes him “more well-rounded” and allows him to relay critical messages to business leaders.

“My ultimate goal is to be able to go in and show complex items, especially in the cyber world, to board members, to our senior leadership, so they understand,” he said. “So they can go ahead and make the appropriate decisions for the business.”

]]>Incorporating game mechanics into daily tasks has proven to be an effective way to motivate workers. As it turns out, gamification techniques don’t just work on us. Google DeepMind is applying the tactic to machine learning.

The triumphs don’t stop there. AI is also becoming a video game master. The Google DeepMind team has trained computational AI systems known as neural nets to play Atari video games such Breakout, which was released in 1976.

The objective of Breakout, a single-player game, is to rid the top third of the video screen of bricks. But “the machine was not given the rules of Breakout,” Erik Brynjolfsson, professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director at the MIT Center for Digital Business, said the recent MIT Disruption Timeline conference.

Instead, the machine was given the raw pixels of the screen; a controller, which moves left and right; and an objective to maximize the score. After 500 games, the neural nets performed better than humans, even developing new strategies, Brynjolfsson said.

Here’s the real punchline: Researchers at DeepMind then took the process of training neural nets on how to win at Atari video games and turned it into a gamification technique for energy efficiency. Researchers trained a system of neural nets on operating scenarios, historical data on energy consumption as well as prediction data and gave it access to all of the gauges and dials; this time, the objective of “the game” was to maximize energy efficiency, a huge cost center for the internet search giant.

“Now, this data center had already been heavily optimized by a bunch of very smart PhDs, some of the best in the world,” Brynjolfsson said. “So this is not an easy problem at all.”

Turns out, the neural nets bested the best, managing a 15% reduction in overall power savings and a 40% reduction of energy used for cooling, one of the biggest consumer of energy, in particular.

“You can imagine if you take that level of improvement and apply it to all of our systems — our factories, our warehouses, our transportation systems, we could get a lot of improvement in our living standards,” Brynjolfsson said.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/google-applies-gamification-technique-to-neural-nets-and-optimizes-its-data-center/feed/0MIT Tech Conference: Programming robots for the real worldhttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/MIT-Tech-Conference-Programming-robots-for-the-real-world
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/MIT-Tech-Conference-Programming-robots-for-the-real-worldFri, 10 Mar 2017 16:32:20 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/MIT-Tech-Conference-Programming-robots-for-the-real-worldRobots are basking in the limelight these days, but the possibility of purchasing a Rosie the robot for the home is still a ways off. In fact, robots are used to solve only a few problems today despite their growing popularity. Three panelists at the recent MIT Tech Conference said that’s because programming robots to...

]]>Robots are basking in the limelight these days, but the possibility of purchasing a Rosie the robot for the home is still a ways off. In fact, robots are used to solve only a few problems today despite their growing popularity. Three panelists at the recent MIT Tech Conference said that’s because programming robots to navigate in the real world, where the unexpected and the accidental are frequent, is complicated.

“The challenge with those sorts of environments is that there’s a really long tail of strange things that can happen where things go wrong and your robot doesn’t work anymore,” said Stefanie Tellex, assistant professor of engineering and computer science whose Humans to Robots Laboratory at Brown University is working to create collaborative robots. “And it’s really challenging to figure out all of these weird, different edge cases where things don’t quite work.”

In the lab, robot manipulators, or machines built and programmed to pick up objects and place them somewhere else, can accurately pick something up 90% of the time. “That might sound good, but if that robot is in your house picking stuff up for you, then it’s dropping your stuff and breaking your stuff one out of every 10 times,” Tellex said.

Programming robots to solve for the edge cases will require “a combination of better mobility, better sensing and perception,” said Helen Greiner, co-founder iRobot, maker of the Roomba, and founder of CyPhy Works Inc., a drone company. “By sensing, I mean more data coming back; and by perception, I mean the interpretation of that data.”

But that may be really hampering the use of robots to solve more problems has nothing to do with programming robots to sense and interpret the data. Instead, it’s the use cases. “People seem hell-bent on trying to solve problems for everyone just to start,” said Ryan Gariepy, co-founder and CTO at Clearpath Robotics. The autonomous car is a good example, with startups and corporations working on building a level five autonomous vehicle, one that would require no human interaction other than turning the car on and off.

Rather than jump on the level five bandwagon, Gariepy said to start small and look for use cases that can be solved with robotics right now.

He pointed to Bosch and its agricultural robot as an example, and his own company, Clearpath, is bringing industrial self-driving vehicles to the factory. “A factory or warehouse is an indoor city,” he said. Factories have roads, traffic, signals and rules that need to be followed, but, unlike city streets where unpredictability abounds, the factory is a fairly controlled environment.

Clearpath’s technology can be deployed in days, and because the self-driving vehicles operate so similarly to cars (they have turnings signals, for example), training the factory staff is fairly simple. By going the factory route, Gariepy said they’re already in production and making money.

]]>The EU-U.S Privacy Shield data transfer pact is now in effect, and U.S. cloud providers, e-commerce retailers and other companies that want to collect customer data from their European Union counterparts can start signing up to use the laws Aug. 1.

The framework, which replaces the Safe Harbor agreement dissolved in October 2015, has stronger security protections for EU citizens whose personal information will be shipped across the Atlantic. U.S. companies on the receiving end have to self-certify, promising to uphold data privacy principles such as “notice” — which requires companies to let customers know what will happen to their data. But in complying with Privacy Shield principles, companies can also use the new pact to improve their reputations as customer-centric organizations, said Enza Iannopollo, an analyst for Forrester Research.

“If I am required by the regulation to put in place a process to address access requests for the data of my customers, how do we do that?” Iannopollo said. “Am I giving them the right explanation, and when I do that, when I communicate with them, am I showing the right level of sensitivity and the right level of understanding?”

If the answer to those questions is yes, that’s good news, Iannopollo said. Customers will give high marks to companies that explain their privacy policies on their websites in ways they can easily understand. If companies give the job to their legal teams, and those teams churn out dense legalese, customers may feel discouraged and underappreciated.

“You’re losing a big opportunity, which is using that content to show once more to your customer, ‘I care about you,'” Iannopollo said. “‘I’m easy to do business with, and I’m putting you charge and this is the control that you have over your data.'”

Wiora noted a disconnect between the state of IT and Creative Solutions’ passion for patient care. The company, based in Fort Worth, Texas, runs more than 49 skilled nursing and 13 assisted living facilities. The CIO determined cloud computing would let the IT side catch up with the rest of the company. The company selected VMware’s vCloud Air, an infrastructure as a service offering, as its core cloud computing technology. VMware, Wiora said, was open to accommodating Creative Solutions’ security vision: A customized version of the Health Information Trust Alliance framework, which incorporates HIPAA, NIST and PCI among other security controls.

The Results

Incorporating the key frameworks into its cloud from the start put Creative Solutions on the proper security track. In addition, the cloud deployment improved the performance of applications such as EHR. Instead of a two-second lag, the company recorded round-trip latency in the 40-to-80 millisecond range. That’s an important plus for care delivery, considering caregivers at an individual facility use kiosk computers to record thousands of patient interactions daily. The company has also addressed internet outages, using Cradlepoint technology that fails over to 4G LTE in the event of disruption. “The company is now a phoenix out of the ashes in terms of IT,” Wiora said.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/long-term-care-firm-finds-security-cloud-computing/feed/0CIO advice: How to build skills for a digital futurehttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/CIO-advice-How-to-build-skills-for-a-digital-future
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/CIO-advice-How-to-build-skills-for-a-digital-futureWed, 22 Jun 2016 16:33:44 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/CIO-advice-How-to-build-skills-for-a-digital-futureHow can CIOs develop the right skills for the digital future? A panel of experts doles out CIO advice at the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium.

]]>How to attract and retain talent for a digital future? That was the question posed by session moderator George Westerman, principal research scientist at MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, at the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. Wrapping up a discussion among three business executives and a prominent academic that ranged from using data to find the right talent to dealing with robots in the workplace, Westerman asked, “What one piece of advice would you give to a CIO how to build the right skills for the future in their unit and the organization?”

Steve Phillips, of Avnet Inc., speaks on a panel on developing skills at the recent MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. To his right is Karen Kocher, of Cigna, and to his is left is Gerald Chertavian, of Year Up.

Karen Kocher: “I would have it be for the CIOs to be advocates of data-based talent decisions.”

Chief learning officer for healthcare insurance company Cigna, Kocher relies on data and various software tools to “identify the tendencies, the characteristics, the competencies of an individual.” Cigna does this to determine what differentiates a high performer from his or her peers. The company uses the same method to create a “role profile” that can be used as a reference point when helping others to develop their own skills. CIOs are key to implementing such tools and systems, she said, “because you are the ones most people look at as the sources of valuable data and information.”

Steve Phillips: “Hire the best and trust the people.”

Phillips is CIO of electronics distributor Avnet Inc. His strategy of developing skills for a digital future starts with finding the right people — often by building relationships with students and professors at universities. He also emphasizes the importance of building teams of people with the “right diversity” of say, thoughts or skills. Not only does that make for a powerful team, but it helps leaders with their own personal growth, Phillips said. “It also should drive for excellence and rigor as well.”

Gerald Chertavian: “Think differently about talent, where it resides and how you access it.”

Chertavian is CEO and founder of nonprofit Year Up, which helps low-income young people build their technical and business skills and get jobs. He stressed that if organizations look for talent in just the usual places — namely, four-year colleges and universities — “you’re really starting to narrow the pond in which you are fishing.” The 18-to-24-year-olds Year Up works with are highly motivated, Chertavian said, and stay in jobs two-to-four times longer than the average Millennial, who sticks around for 18 months.

Tom Davenport: “Plan for augmentation, not automation. Think of smart people working together with smart machines.”

The analytics and knowledge management scholar cheated, using two sentences instead of the one Westerman required — but both drive home the same idea. The digital future will be people working alongside robots. Robots are smart. They learn fast. And they “keep taking over things that we normally did,” Davenport said. So they aren’t overshadowed, the people CIOs hire need to be good at what they do — at some technical skill, such as programming — but they also need to exhibit “human” characteristics and skills such as initiative, interpersonal skills and teamwork.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/cio-advice-how-to-build-skills-for-a-digital-future/feed/0Don’t wait for the government to fortify your data governance strategyhttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Dont-wait-for-the-government-to-fortify-your-data-governance-strategy
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Dont-wait-for-the-government-to-fortify-your-data-governance-strategyMon, 20 Jun 2016 16:13:31 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Dont-wait-for-the-government-to-fortify-your-data-governance-strategyHaving a tough time defining an IT security strategy able to take on big data and the Internet of Things? The panelists on the “Big Data 2.0: Next-Gen Privacy, Security and Analytics” session at last month’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium feel your pain. One big conundrum for IT security practitioners, the panel agreed, is how...

]]>Having a tough time defining an IT security strategy able to take on big data and the Internet of Things? The panelists on the “Big Data 2.0: Next-Gen Privacy, Security and Analytics” session at last month’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium feel your pain. One big conundrum for IT security practitioners, the panel agreed, is how enterprises should handle security and data governance amid the coming onslaught of regulations aimed at IoT and big data.

Moderator Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, said companies can’t afford to wait for regulations to come up with a governance strategy; IT security leaders need to figure out where the vulnerabilities are vis-à-vis new technologies — or put themselves at risk.

Rob Thomas, vice president of product development at IBM Analytics, said he likes to think about building data governance strategies like building castles. “When castles were constructed in the 1100s, they [were built as] a place to wage an offensive, to go on offense,” he said. He added that this is exactly how enterprises should approach their data strategies. “If the organization is waiting to hear what the regulations are, and then you respond with a data strategy, you have no chance of being ahead of the market.”

According to Thomas, going on the offense requires knowing what your data assets are, the flow and lifecycle of that data, and who has access to it and why.

Legal repercussions put damper on playing offense security

However, the task of building a data governance model that can tackle these demands in light of emerging applications such as IoT is easier said than done, said Anthony Christie, CMO of Level 3 Communications, an internet service provider and telecommunications company. If companies get it wrong, the consequences can be costly — and dire. He pointed to his own industry as an example.

“Carriers and internet service providers today … have the ability, in many respects, to proactively play this offense and to stop the number of threats — but the laws around culpability, if you get it wrong, are so grave that right now some of the more conservative providers don’t even want to deal with it,” he said.

So, is there a way to get out ahead of lagging government regulations? Pentland brought up the idea of test beds, or specific towns or cities in which companies can experiment operating under new rules, to gauge what consumers and citizens think is working.

Christie also believes test beds are a great opportunity for companies to explore and look for partners to develop their security and data governance strategies. He said these types of relationships have proven beneficial to Level 3, but companies may have to look beyond the obvious partners.

“In [Level 3’s] case, we actually had better success not with other service providers … but with equipment providers, who want to develop their equipment better,” he said.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/dont-wait-government-fortify-data-governance-strategy/feed/0MIT CIO: The CISO reporting structure needs to changehttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/MIT-CIO-The-CISO-reporting-structure-needs-to-change
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/MIT-CIO-The-CISO-reporting-structure-needs-to-changeTue, 31 May 2016 22:00:03 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/MIT-CIO-The-CISO-reporting-structure-needs-to-changeWith the explosion of the Internet of Things, it’s time to rethink the CISO role — including who that role reports to. This was the consensus of a panel of security leaders at this month’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. The traditional reporting structure that puts security and risk officers under the IT...

]]>With the explosion of the Internet of Things, it’s time to rethink the CISO role — including who that role reports to. This was the consensus of a panel of security leaders at this month’s MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. The traditional reporting structure that puts security and risk officers under the IT organization doesn’t work in the age of Internet-connected things, they said.

The massive growth in the number of connected devices will create new and exciting opportunities for businesses, but it will also create more attack surfaces, the panel said. IoT equals more cyber-risks, better hackers and a flourishing black market for the stolen data from those devices. Indeed, IoT’s impact on security spending could be huge: from $6.89 billion in 2015 to $28.90 billion by 2020, according to an estimate by research firm Markets and Markets.

The IoT challenge for security leaders is two-fold: They need to convince their companies that security should be built into Internet-enabled products and services from the get-go; they also need to show the business and board members that security is an enabler, not an obstacle, to business processes.

That’s a big hurdle to clear, said Mark Morrison, senior vice president and CISO for State Street Corp. in Boston. In his experience, employees, including business leaders, don’t really get how security fits into business operations.

“We’re constantly balancing operations with security,” he said. “It’s a much larger challenge, because everything that people do with a computer, they expect to work miraculously.”

This lack of understanding goes both ways: IT leaders have often been guilty of pushing out tools for the business without completely understanding the business risks and requirements, said Sam Phillips, CISO for Samsung Business Services.

Reporting structure a barrier to cybersecurity

The first step in turning the tide of how the security function is viewed by the business is having the CISO role operate independently from the IT organization, Morrison and Phillips said.

Morrison’s State Street job is his fifth stint as a chief security officer, and he has always reported to the CIO.

But at State Street, Morrison also reports directly to the board. “I’m the only standing agenda item,” he said of board meetings, which meets nine times a year. Every time, he fields the same questions about cyber-risks: How serious are they? Does he have enough resources to do his job? All this while his boss, the CIO, sits by his side.

“What happens is this natural tension between operations and cybersecurity, and there’s only so much money. There’s only so much time and prioritization that can be allocated,” he said. The reporting structure makes it “hard to give a very honest answer.”

Phillips agreed that the current reporting structure has become a roadblock. In his previous CISO job, he started out reporting to the CIO, and found it difficult to keep security moving forward. One big issue was resources.

“I wanted money to drive security programs,” Philips said, but when security was “hidden off in someone else’s organization,” his programs often got short shrift. Eventually, he ended up reporting to the chief legal officer. This separation from IT allowed him to maintain his programs’ momentum.

“I think a lot of companies are going to see [CISOs and] chief risk officers reporting directly to the COO or CEO,” Morrison said. Phillips agreed, adding that he’s seen several other companies where these functions report directly to the audit committee or the board of directors.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/total-cio/mit-cio-ciso-reporting-structure-needs-change/feed/0Upside, barriers to a ride on the sharing economyhttp://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Upside-barriers-to-a-ride-on-the-sharing-economy
http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Upside-barriers-to-a-ride-on-the-sharing-economyFri, 27 May 2016 21:13:02 +0000http://searchcio.techtarget.com/blog/TotalCIO/Upside-barriers-to-a-ride-on-the-sharing-economyUber ranks among the best-known platform business models, Find out what a company manager has to say about the pros and cons of the sharing economy.

Before CIOs sign up their companies for a gig in the sharing economy, there are a few things to know. Chris Taylor, general manager, Uber Boston, bears both good and bad news for organizations looking to build a platform on which an ecosystem of value creators and consumers can converge. Taylor, speaking during a recent panel discussion on platforms at the 2016 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, detailed the pros and cons of these business models.

First, the upside:

• Scalability

Taylor cited the platform business model’s “speed to scale” and the ability to unlock the potential of unutilized assets globally as its most valuable asset. In Uber’s case, that means linking up people seeking rides with cars and drivers. The company operates in more than 450 cities around the world; it hit the billion-trip-milestone in December 2015. The ride service was officially launched in 2011.

• Flexibility

Since platforms don’t carry the baggage of traditional enterprises, platform creators can rapidly change their offerings. Taylor points out that Uber is “selling you the ability to get where you want to go.” The platform isn’t necessarily wedded to its current car-and-driver approach. Indeed, getting from point A to point B could eventually involve autonomous vehicles. Uber began testing a driverless car May 2016 in Pittsburgh.

• Investor support

Platforms such as Uber are garnering considerable support on Wall Street. Marshall Van Alstyne, professor at Boston University, Digital Fellow at MIT and the moderator of the platform panel, pointed out that Uber’s market capitalization exceeds that of BMW — underscoring the idea that the platform holds the greatest value, not the metal box running on it.

Now, here’s the cloud to go along with the silver lining:

• Barriers to entry

Platform business models, when successfully executed, thrive on network effects. Those effects come into play when more and more value creators and more and more consumers participate in the platform. The value of the platform increases with every additional participant. In the case of a transportation platform, the more drivers sign up to provide rides, the more valuable the offering becomes for consumers. On the other side of the platform, a large pool of riders will tend to pull in more drivers. Network effects, however, also hinder platform newcomers.

“It’s more attractive for drivers to join a platform that is dominant,” Taylor said.

And playing catch-up with a platform that enjoys a superior network effect is going to be challenging, he added.

• The criticality of user experience

If your company plans to make headway against other platforms, plan on making user experience a priority. That also goes for established platforms hoping to hold onto a healthy population of consumers and the value creators they attract. The best defense, Taylor said, is “providing the best service to both sides of the platform.” Uber monitors key metrics to keep tabs on the rider and driver experience. For drivers, the key measures include utilization (How busy are they?) and sales (What do they make per trip? Per hour?).

“We have to offer the best earning potential,” Taylor said.

• The need to juggle supply and demand

Startup platforms face a chicken-and-egg problem: The platform needs buyers to attract sellers and sellers to attract buyers. Keeping those forces in balance is a continuing challenge for platforms. If a rider seeks a ride and finds none available, that’s a rider that may switch platforms or alternative forms of transport.

Taylor said it all boils down to keeping “a tight link between supply and demand.”